


The darkness that lurks in our mind

by uumuu



Series: One more soul to the call [4]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: AU of my own AU basically, Alternate Universe - Horror, Dark, Death here is definitive, Not a crossover or a fusion, Silent Hill elements, Sorry I've been obsessed with Silent Hill lately and this happened
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 11:58:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2387486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uumuu/pseuds/uumuu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As it is said, monsters don't sleep under your bed, they sleep inside your head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The darkness that lurks in our mind

The first thing Finarfin noticed, as he looked out of his window that morning, was the fog. Fog wasn't uncommon in Alqualondë, however. A shimmering haze would often rise from the sea and shroud the town in the first hours of day, so he paid it no particular heed. 

He had had a nightmare. 

He went through his morning routine in a troubled state of mind, reliving the sinister images of his dream in every gesture, with nothing to distract him from them. The small house he shared with his wife, in a tranquil corner in the outskirts of the town, was quiet. Eärwen was an early riser, and was surely already out and about her business. He was glad he could be with her. He had felt like being born anew when he had relinquished the kingship to his older brother, as soon as Ñolofinwë had been remade, and left Tirion for good. 

It was when he finally stepped outside that he realized the fog was unnatural. Hours had passed, it was almost midday, but it hadn't lifted yet, and was extraordinarily dense. He could scarcely see two feet in front of him. 

And it wasn't just the fog. The town – so full of life, there had been singing and merrymaking only the previous night – seemed to be deserted.

Finarfin wandered aimlessly through streets and alleys he knew inside out, and loved like no other place. The fishmongers' stalls were empty. No basket weavers sang cheerfully as they plied their trade. The pearls lay abandoned in their caskets, with no potential buyers to argue over their fineness. None of the familiar noises of sailing rose from the harbour. Nothing. 

That had to be a nightmare, too. 

He searched the town from one end to the other twice, without encountering anybody. Finally, he headed to the docks. He loved the town, but that one place was his bane. He had never been able to overcome the horror of the kinslaying, the day his existence had been torn apart leaving only fragile tatters, and stayed away from it if he could.

The fog was thicker next to the water, and so he noticed the blood only too late. 

The docks were covered in blood, exactly as on that cursed day. The ships were all gone, again.

Finarfin stood petrified, but trembling from head to toe, his mind seemingly flooded by a viscous mist too. He looked to his right. Blood dripped from a large pool mere inches from his foot into the water. He flinched at sight and took a couple steps back. He turned then, and made to rush away, but slipped on a long patch of blood he hadn't seen before, and fell face first into it. 

He tried to scramble to his feet, but the blood pulled him back, like the mire of the past that still, at times, bogged him down, and he fell into it again. When he managed to stand up, it was all over him, its cloying smell so strong he retched and vomited until the only thing he could have expelled were his own guts.

“What is this?” he muttered to himself, bewilderment and helplessness clawing at his soul. 

There was no-one to answer.

He slowly made his way to the fountain the fishermen used to wash their catch, and tried to get the blood off of his face and hands, and his clothes, as best he could. 

From there, he descended the steps that led to the shore on shaky legs.

Only fog and greyness.

“Where is everybody?” he stuttered. “Eärwen!” he desperately called. Could it be- another attack? Or maybe the End had come and it was the first effect of it. Still, it did not explain why he alone had been spared. Why he had been left alone to face it, again.

He jumped when he heard footsteps behind him, the faint sound of sand being crushed and strewn about. He spun around. Walking from the docks towards the main road – the road that led to Tirion – was Maglor. He strode across the sand, his curly hair flowing unbound on his back like black seaweed. 

“You!” Finarfin gasped. 

Maglor stopped and turned. “Uncle,” he greeted with a small bow. He was dressed in an old, threadbare black gown, but carried his golden harp with him (the first harp his father had made for him. He had had countless other ones afterwards, better ones, but he had always maintained that he would never appreciate any other instrument more than that, no matter how pure their sound).

Maglor shouldn't have been there. Finarfin anxiously tried to make sense of his sudden appearance as he closed the distance between them. Could he have come back and wrought all that destruction on his own? Finarfin wouldn't have put it past his nephew (no, not his nephew, he hadn't been in a long time). He had been there when Maglor, together with his brother, had left a heap of corpses in the Valar's own camp. 

Finarfin stopped a few steps away from the black-haired elf, and looked him up and down – his deceivingly gentle smiling face, the scars that cut pale lines on his golden skin, hands that showed no sign of being in any way injured. Finarfin noticed, too, that his gown was wet from his bare feet up to his knees, and that what drenched it was blood, not water. A trail of blood stretched on the sand where he had passed.

“What- what have you done?”

“Why, I killed your brothers-in-law, remember?” Maglor replied conversationally, and shrugged one shoulder. “Too bad you couldn't do anything about it.”

Finarfin gaped in horror. He did remember. He remembered every grisly detail of it. He remembered the shock, the revulsion. Two of Olwë's sons dead at his feet, and he had been cleaning his sword with a dead sailor's scarf.

“Well, I'm off then,” Maglor resumed, with the same light tone, the levity of someone who had had the effrontery to cling to his own life, even after inflicting death upon hundreds of others.

“W-where to?”

“To Tirion, to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” Finarfin barked, growing more and more outraged.

“Every killing must be commemorated with song,” Maglor replied, as if the answer should have been obvious. “Perhaps you would like to join me.”

“Join you?” Finarfin felt his guts twist again. “You're a demon! You, and your father and your brothers!”

“Definitely. But even demons have the right to make merry. So, would you like to come?”

“What have you done here, now-...?” 

“What do you think?” 

Maglor waited vainly for an answer and made to start again. Finarfin launched himself at him and caught his left arm, halting him. Centuries of repressed rage, a resentment too deep to ever be quelled, overcame him. He hadn't been able to prevent the Kinslaying, he had always been too remissive, but he could change that now.

His hands wrapped around Maglor's neck. The treacherous neck that produced the velvety voice that had beguiled everybody, hiding his veritable stone-hearted nature.

“You- you- I hate you!”

His fingers pressed down into the soft skin, and a choked gurgle spilled from Maglor's lips. He would end it this time, even if it meant staining his own hands. But when death should have been near, Maglor smiled once more, and vanished. 

' _Kinslayer_!' a voice scoffed in Finarfin's head, and he felt like he had just woken up from a nightmare.

His hands were wrapped around his wife's neck. He started and let go, but it was too late.

Eärwen dropped at his feet, lifeless, and crumbled to dust, mingling with the sand as if she'd never existed. 

“No,” he whispered brokenly, staring at the sand, and fell to his knees. He began to shake violently. There was nothing left anymore now. Now it was truly over. He had ended it.

The mire swallowed him. 

*

When Indis awoke from her afternoon nap, an eerie silence hung over Valmar. The bell that usually greeted her awakening withheld its melodious toll. The town was blanketed by blackness. She couldn't even see her hand when she brought it to her face to brush her hair back. She sat unmoving for a while, a myriad questions clashing in her head. 

Finally, she stood up and and groped blindly on her bedside table to find a lamp. She lighted it, and passed into the sitting room. Her personal servant's embroidery loop lay abandoned on the floor. There was no trace of the woman. Darkness poured in from the wide, open windows. Not the darkness of a moonless night; a heavy sort of gloom very similar to Ungoliantë's unlight. She shivered. 

“Findis?” she called, stepping into her daughter's rooms, which were right next to hers, an arrangement they had never altered since moving to Valmar after the Darkening. 

Findis would, at that time of day, have been sitting at her desk; she would have raised her head, and smiled at her mother. There was nobody there either.

If darkness had descended upon Valinor, if the sun had disappeared from the sky, there could be only one explanation. But why had everybody else left, and neglected to wake her? They couldn't have forgotten her, and they couldn't have forsaken her on purpose, either. And could she really have slept through whatever had happened? It made no sense.

She shook herself – she wasn't one to lose heart that easily, she trusted the Valar's design – and decided to seek one of the Maiar that inhabited Valmar, and ask for help. Surely they hadn't all abandoned the town. They had to know somebody was still there. 

She changed into comfortable clothes, and headed towards the main staircase. 

As she made her way through the familiar hallways, she soon noticed that the palace seemed to be in decay, as if nobody had inhabited it in a very long time. Mold crept up walls which should have been pristine – she had seen them not two hours before. Portions of them were half crumbled. There were holes in the floor, the colourful tiles shattered and overturned. The deterioration was too pervasive to have been effected in so short a time.

She ran into a giant spider web at the foot of the stairs that connected her wing of the palace to the main body. The sticky threads clung to her face, and she stumbled, battling the suffocating sensation of being trapped. 

She heaved a sigh of relief when she reached the main staircase. Just as she made to turn towards it, however, she began to hear a hollow sound she couldn't quite identify coming from the corridor in front of her. She stopped. If there was a sound, somebody must be there too. Someone who had been left behind, just like her, or a Maia searching for lost elves. 

Or perhaps an enemy. 

She weighed the possibilities. Enemies could be lurking anywhere, but if there was somebody in need of help she couldn't abandon them. She resolutely walked on. 

“Is anybody there?” she asked, cautiously picking her way through the debris strewn all over the floor, the light from the lamp casting a wide cone of brightness before her. 

The sound became louder and sharper as she advanced – it was an eldritch clanging and screeching sound – and was accompanied by the thudding of heavy footfalls. An ominous presentiment reared its head inside her, but she suppressed it and continued, until she arrived to the end of the corridor. The sound – whatever it was – was nearby. She held her breath. 

A large shape rounded the corner, ambling towards her, taking heavy step after heavy step, until it entered the radiance from the lamp.

Indis gaped then screamed at the top of her lungs (she had only screamed in a similar manner when Finwë had told her he would be going to Formenos with _him_ ).

What had rounded the corner was a monster. A hideous creature with the body of a woman, its head covered by a large triangle-shaped device, like a torn off star-point. Its white skirt was blood-spluttered, its bare breasts were split in four by two deep intersected gashes each. It hauled an oversized, cleaver-like knife behind it. 

Indis backed down, turned and sped along the corridor and towards the stairs. She had to find help as quickly as possible. That thing had to be one of Melkor's own creatures, the time had truly come. 

She flew down each flight, spurred by fear and shock. When she reached the large entry hall, a figure was sitting in the alcove to the right of the doors. She balked at first, her chest heaving with breathlessness, her heart leaping in her chest (she could hear the sound clearly in her ears as if it came from outside). Then she looked, and recognized _him_. 

“You,” she hissed. 

It was Fëanáro, as a child. He sat motionlessly, with large vacant eyes, looking forlorn and despondent. He had looked like that when she first met him. Finwë himself had told her many years later, before he left for Formenos, that Fëanáro had cried so desperately and unremittingly that he had ended up slapping him to make him stop, before hauling him into Ingwë's sister's palace and forcing him to seat in the alcove.

“You!” Indis repeated, the overarching shadow of the past unfolding at her feet. He cast that shadow. He had refused everybody else light. His very presence there proved that what Ulmo had said had been true: he was part of the Marring, he was a seed of destruction. “It's all your fault!” she shrieked, “everything is your fault! Everything _must_ be your fault!” 

She dashed to the child and gripped his right shoulder with her left hand, so tight that her nails snagged onto his shirt. 

“If only you had disappeared together with your mother!” she cursed, and slapped him. Over and over again, until the left half of his face was swollen, and blood oozed from his cheek and nose.

He didn't protest, or react in any way. 

The smack of the slaps and her rage deafened Indis to the monster's approach. When the knife was swung down she barely managed to avoid being slit in two. 

She started and let go of the child. The monster stood between her and the exit so she dived down the corridor at her back, and into the first open door (she couldn't risk losing time on a locked door). It was, by sheer coincidence, the music room where she had first confessed her love to Finwë, when he had been Ingwë's guest. It was a place of bittersweet memories.

It also had a second door leading into a smaller reading room, which in turn opened onto a portico. If she reached it, she would be safe. She would lose herself in the garden which surrounded the palace and the monster would not find her. She ran, glad more than ever for her athletic training, but stumbled on a stool and fell. The clanging became louder with every second, echoing down the corridor. She quickly got back to her feet and proceeded more cautiously among the furniture, cursing Fëanáro again. She had dropped the lamp in the hall when she had slapped him. 

Suddenly, a hand was laid on her arm. She flinched and cried, wrenching the arm away.

“Indis,” a friendly, light voice greeted.

“Wh- who's there?” 

“It's me, Míriel,” the voice replied, “do you not remember me?”

“Míriel...what are you doing here?” 

“I am looking for my child. He came this way, but I lost him as soon as he entered the palace. He is such a frisky boy. Have you seen him?”

“No...no, I have not,” Indis answered hesitatingly. She couldn't tell Míriel the truth. “Have you not noticed? It is pitch black in here.”

“It is fine for me. It is as it was in the Halls, I am used to the dark.”

“...we cannot stay here.” Indis grasped Míriel's hand, ignoring her words, and tried to pull her towards the second door.

“Why?”

“It is not safe.”

“It is fine, I told you. I can guide you.”

Indis couldn't see her, but she heard the smile in her tone. How could she be so calm? If the end had come, it was logic that the fëar of the dead would have been released from Mandos, and Valmar was closer to the Halls than Tirion was. Exactly because of that Míriel should have realised the state the town was in, should have been aware of what was going on.

“No, no, we must find help. This way.”

“No, I cannot leave without my child.”

' _You already did once_ ' Indis almost retorted.

The clanging drew closer and closer. 

There was no time to tarry.

“I have to go.”

Indis let go of Míriel's hand, and headed towards the door, praying she would be able to reach it in time. The monster entered the room as she was about to lay her hand on the handle. There was a thud – not the sound of footsteps anymore, the hollow noise of a large object hitting the ground – and light spilled behind her.

Míriel screamed. Indis peered over her shoulder. 

The child was lying on the ground, in a puddle of blood, the lamp clutched tightly to his chest. He writhed and rasped, the left half of his face turned purple by the bruises. Míriel ran to him, and crouched down next to him.

Indis looked at him, then up at the monster.

 _That_ was what should have been done all those thousands of years before, just as she had wished moments before. If he hadn't been there, everybody else would have been happy. The monster was, perhaps, not an evil creature, but a deliverer of justice, sent by Eru in his unequalled righteousness to erase every last vestige of his existence. The Valar had been too merciful. They had known he would cause suffering and ruin, they should have done away with him while he was still unable to do much harm. He had killed his own mother, after all.

The child sputtered. 

“Indis, help me.” Míriel lifted him into her arms and held him close. “Help me.”

Indis focused on the silver-haired woman again. She saw the monster creep up behind her. She didn't move. She could never have saved her. If Míriel hadn't died, she could never have married Finwë. 

The monster plunged its knife into Míriel's back and pulled it out again. Míriel's eyes bulged with the agony and the despair. “Hel-p...” she begged one more time with her last breath. She fell over her son's dead body and the light was almost completely obscured again.

In that instant a chain wound around Indis' right ankle and lifted her up until she was hanging upside down from the ceiling, her hair cascading towards the floor like a rich golden curtain. 

Terror sunk its whetted fangs into her, and she screamed, and thrashed, but it only served to make the blood rush faster to her head. 

The monster approached slowly – it felt like a whole excruciating eternity – and finally stood in front of her.

She screamed again. Why was it happening to her too? She had never done anything wrong, always lived by the Valar's rules, borne her trials with faith and humility.

The monster lifted the knife with a jerky movement and put the tip against her lower belly. 

Indis raised a shrill cry. 

“Please...please...spare me.”

The faint ray of light glinted off the knife and fell directly on Míriel's corpse. If only she hadn't stopped to talk to her.

“Please please plea-s-”

The monster gripped the knife with both hands, drew its arms back and jammed it into Indis's womb, then pushed it down through her body, and out just above her left ear.

**Author's Note:**

> The background of this would be Maedhros and Maglor getting with their Silmarils and ghost army to Valinor. Their targets are of course the Valar, but as they battle them, Valinor turns into a Silent Hill of sorts, and everybody's personal issues take a life of their own. So, while Maedhros and Maglor's intervention creates the distortion that makes the apparitions possible, they're not responsible for what they do – it depends on the psyches who birth them (the fem!Pyramid Head Indis sees is nothing more than a materialization of her own feelings towards Fëanor and Míriel). They don't have anything to do with being good or bad, either.
> 
> The fem!Pyramid Head was inspired by the many wonderful cosplays done by women.
> 
> The title is from [a track](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGUi6spQ9M0) in the Silent Hill 2 OST.


End file.
